In Laos in a wet winter, as I sat planter-style in a wicker chair on the verandah of an ecotourism resort taking a holiday from my holiday, I fell vehemently in love with Anthony Burgess. I’d discovered a battered copy of his 70’s novel Earthly Powers among the limited selection in a Vientienne bookshop. It had everything: big words, gentle syntax. Catholicism. The end of empire. Planters sitting in wicker chairs on verandahs. Evil. The pope. The pope, evil.
I knew I loved him and needed to read more, but I never found anything in second hand shops other than A Clockwork Orange, which I’ve known only from the Kubrick film and which has always struck me as a rather adolescent work, the kind of thing you stick in your duffel coat pocket on your way to the first lecture of your Film Studies degree.
When I mentioned my love for Burgess over tea to some friends they pressed me to take the autobiography, the first portly volume (Little Wilson & Big God) and the second more emaciated one (You’ve Had Your Time).
I knew his life was grim, but wow! Holey jumpers and socks, Batman, this was emotional and financial poverty indeed – mother and sister dead of the flu when he was an infant, father spitefully washing his talent away in a torrent of booze, left after his father’s death with only the begrudging lodgings of a dutiful stepmother to see him through his Catholic education. The war brings more grimness as he is exiled on Gibraltar with only Barbary apes and their more Simian cousins in the British Army for company. After that he fails as a grammar school teacher and ends up in another kind of exile in colonial Malaya, boozing his way through hot evenings, slapping mosquitoes with one hand and the backsides of gap-toothed Malay prostitutes with the other.
The character of Burgess himself is strangely unsympathetic. He’s always winding people up and getting into fights. When late in the second book he realises that he and his second wife have no friends, you’re not surprised. The books are terribly clever-clever. He must have been an interesting dinner party guest, but you wouldn’t have wanted him lingering after coffee, ogling your boobs as he declined Latin verbs and bitched about how much more for real he was than Somerset Maughm.
He was more for real, learning Malay, Chinese and Arabic, teaching in grim schools out in postwar Malaya as the British Empire sighed into its final Singapore Sling. And his concern with making a buck is refreshing, showing how much of his art has its genesis in urgent rates payments and rental arrears; the boring things in life.
He harps on about being born to Catholicism, unlike Graham Greene who converted to it. But he himself was born to music, and converted to writing only when it became clear he wouldn’t be a composer. His passion for music, clearly central to his life, left me weirdly unmoved. It is a formal kind of passion, all quavers and symphonies in four movements.
I was relieved to discover that A Clockwork Orange has been falsely shoved into all those duffel coats all these years – there is a final, grown-up chapter, removed by the book’s American publisher, in which Alex becomes an adult, gets some perspective and renounces violence forever. Burgess bitches on about how annoyed he was that this was deleted.
There is something slightly disingenuous about Burgess’s account of himself. It sounds too much like a man trying to convince you a series of mistakes and accidents were all the result of some very grand and clever scheme that you were just too stupid to perceive. He definitely doth protest too much, perhaps trying to prove that all his best work was achieved without really trying, without really caring.
He’s the same about his wives – both formiddable characters who drive a lot of what happens in the narrative, although he doesn’t speak much about the emotional power they clearly wield over him. It’s unsatisfying - you know there must be more to the story, but he won’t – or can’t - tell you. You’ll have to turn to his novels to find out the truth about his emotional drivers.
But for all that, like Burgess himself, sticking by his alcoholic first wife as she descended into cyrrohis and death, I still love him.
If these books were people, they would be a workplace crush for whose email account you had found the password. As you obsessively hack into emails about budget reports and three o’clock meetings, you know you’re not really getting to the soul of the matter, but that doesn’t stop you.
In a nutshell: Poverty stricken would-be musician is forced by circumstance to become a best selling genius of a writer.
Little Wilson & Big God and You’ve Had Your Time score seven chocolates out of a possible ten, including the popular chewy caramel.
I knew I loved him and needed to read more, but I never found anything in second hand shops other than A Clockwork Orange, which I’ve known only from the Kubrick film and which has always struck me as a rather adolescent work, the kind of thing you stick in your duffel coat pocket on your way to the first lecture of your Film Studies degree.
When I mentioned my love for Burgess over tea to some friends they pressed me to take the autobiography, the first portly volume (Little Wilson & Big God) and the second more emaciated one (You’ve Had Your Time).
I knew his life was grim, but wow! Holey jumpers and socks, Batman, this was emotional and financial poverty indeed – mother and sister dead of the flu when he was an infant, father spitefully washing his talent away in a torrent of booze, left after his father’s death with only the begrudging lodgings of a dutiful stepmother to see him through his Catholic education. The war brings more grimness as he is exiled on Gibraltar with only Barbary apes and their more Simian cousins in the British Army for company. After that he fails as a grammar school teacher and ends up in another kind of exile in colonial Malaya, boozing his way through hot evenings, slapping mosquitoes with one hand and the backsides of gap-toothed Malay prostitutes with the other.
The character of Burgess himself is strangely unsympathetic. He’s always winding people up and getting into fights. When late in the second book he realises that he and his second wife have no friends, you’re not surprised. The books are terribly clever-clever. He must have been an interesting dinner party guest, but you wouldn’t have wanted him lingering after coffee, ogling your boobs as he declined Latin verbs and bitched about how much more for real he was than Somerset Maughm.
He was more for real, learning Malay, Chinese and Arabic, teaching in grim schools out in postwar Malaya as the British Empire sighed into its final Singapore Sling. And his concern with making a buck is refreshing, showing how much of his art has its genesis in urgent rates payments and rental arrears; the boring things in life.
He harps on about being born to Catholicism, unlike Graham Greene who converted to it. But he himself was born to music, and converted to writing only when it became clear he wouldn’t be a composer. His passion for music, clearly central to his life, left me weirdly unmoved. It is a formal kind of passion, all quavers and symphonies in four movements.
I was relieved to discover that A Clockwork Orange has been falsely shoved into all those duffel coats all these years – there is a final, grown-up chapter, removed by the book’s American publisher, in which Alex becomes an adult, gets some perspective and renounces violence forever. Burgess bitches on about how annoyed he was that this was deleted.
There is something slightly disingenuous about Burgess’s account of himself. It sounds too much like a man trying to convince you a series of mistakes and accidents were all the result of some very grand and clever scheme that you were just too stupid to perceive. He definitely doth protest too much, perhaps trying to prove that all his best work was achieved without really trying, without really caring.
He’s the same about his wives – both formiddable characters who drive a lot of what happens in the narrative, although he doesn’t speak much about the emotional power they clearly wield over him. It’s unsatisfying - you know there must be more to the story, but he won’t – or can’t - tell you. You’ll have to turn to his novels to find out the truth about his emotional drivers.
But for all that, like Burgess himself, sticking by his alcoholic first wife as she descended into cyrrohis and death, I still love him.
If these books were people, they would be a workplace crush for whose email account you had found the password. As you obsessively hack into emails about budget reports and three o’clock meetings, you know you’re not really getting to the soul of the matter, but that doesn’t stop you.
In a nutshell: Poverty stricken would-be musician is forced by circumstance to become a best selling genius of a writer.
Little Wilson & Big God and You’ve Had Your Time score seven chocolates out of a possible ten, including the popular chewy caramel.
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